Quiz, Question bank and Quiz Reports in Moodle 2.2

Some of the activity modules that you might already be familiar with using in Moodle 1.9 have been much improved for Moodle 2. We are getting excited about some of the changes to the Quizmodule, the related Question bank, and the Quiz reports available.

Quiz: student view

From the students’ point of view, navigation around a quiz is a lot more user friendly. They now see a Quiz navigation area on the left-hand side of the screen, which allows them to move between the questions more easily.

They also have the opportunity to flag any question that they are not sure about. This flag remains on the question until they remove it, and they would see it when they finish the quiz and before submitting, giving them a chance to go back and review their answer. The tutor would also see the questions that the student has flagged, and would thereby be made aware of any problems the student has faced.

Quiz: teacher view

From the teachers’ point of view, there are also a few improvements, in particular when setting up the quiz (under ‘Edit Settings’).

After giving the quiz a Name and an Introduction (where you can explain what you would like the student to do) you can select Display description on course page. This would display the information you have provided in the Introduction field (under ‘Edit Settings’) on the course page, just below the link to the quiz (so you wouldn’t need to use an label to give instructions).

Still under ‘Edit Settings’ the option for shuffling questions has now become Question order and been moved to a section called Layout. You can also decide where to include the page breaks (Every x questions) underNew page.

You can still make changes to the page breaks later when editing the quiz questions by clicking on the Order and paging tab.

You also have the option, under the Display section in ‘Edit Settings’, to Show the user’s picture while the quiz is open. This would be useful for exam situations where the invigilator needs to ensure that the person taking the quiz is indeed the enrolled student::

Another nice feature of the quiz in Moodle 2.2 is the possibility of setting different start and finish dates and times, and number of attempts, for different groups. To do this, click on Group overrides under Quiz administration. On the next screen click on the Add group override button and this will take you to the Edit override screen where you can adjust the settings for particular groups that you have previously set up:

You can also change settings for individual students, by going to User overrides under Quiz administration, for example if you want to allow a student to re-take a quiz but you had originally set the number of Attempts allowed to just 1.

Question bank:

You can see from the screenshot on the right that you can access the Question bank either from under the Quiz administration, or from under the Course administration Settings.The question bank in Moodle 2.2 is more flexible, as you can share questions within a course with your Lesson activities. To do this, you need to Export your questions in a Gift or XML format, and then Import questions when you create your lesson activity.

If you have admin access, you can share questions across different sites, but even without admin access you can do this by using the Export and Import functions, saving the export files on to your machine, and then importing them into the relevant activity on another course site.

To add questions to your quiz, you can either go to Edit quiz or to Questions under the Question bank under Quiz administration.

Click on the Create a new question button and you will see the Choose a question type to add box. Click into the radio button next to each type to see a short description of the question type.

At Glyndŵr we have most of the same options in Moodle 2.2 as we had in 1.9 (although the Drag-and-Drop Matching is no longer available). There are, however, two new variations on the Calculated question type: Calculated multichoice and Calculated simple.

Initially I was quite excited to see the option to add tags when you create a question in Moodle 2, as I was hoping that this would make it easier to search for your questions. However, I was disappointed because, as far as I can tell, this feature is still currently at the development stage. So, at the moment, all that adding tags will do is create a pretty word cloud if you add a Tags block to your course – clicking on the tags in the tags block only gives you the option of seeing recent blog entries, users or courses who mention the tags, not items in the question bank.

Quiz Reports:

There have been changes to the reports that are available for each quiz in Moodle 2.2, which allow you to see details of each response given by all students.

To access the results, you can go to the Navigation block, drill down to the relevant course, and then to the quiz in question, and then click on Results. You can then click on the ‘arrow head’ icon next to Results to choose whether you want to see Grades, Responses, Statistics or Manual grading.

Alternatively, click into the quiz from the front page of the course, and then click on the link ‘Attempts: x‘ (where x is the number of attempts made).

The Grades report shows all the students’ attempts, with grades for each question and the overall grade:

At the bottom of the page a graph shows the distribution of scores. You can select individual attempts by clicking in the check box on the left of the table, or Select all/Deselect all attempts by using the options underneath the table, and then Regrade or Delete selected attempts.

The Responses report shows the answers given by each student for each question, highlighting whether they are correct or not, but it does not show the students’ score. Again, you can control what you see on the report by setting preferences at the top of the page, you can delete attempts, and you can download the information in a variety of formats.

The new Statistics reportprovides for statistical analysis of the quiz such as average grades and distribution of scores, but it is also possible to drill down into individual questions for detailed analysis. You can download the Quiz information report and the Quiz structure analysis tablein various formats.

Finally, the Manual grading reportmakes it easy to grade questions that need manually grading such as Essay questions. You can click on the link Also show questions that have been graded automatically to edit all grades.

Overall, some nice new features in the Quiz module, and I’m looking forward to starting to use it and to helping our staff to best make use of it.